St. Constantine College

We have a College (9k, fully accredited) https://t.co/RnQQNcvNQy) and k-12 (https://t.co/ukhxbQnnJD). There. Now.

— John Mark N Reynolds (@JMNR) December 20, 2020

CWR Review of Restoring Humanity

CWR: Restoring Humanity offers theological foundations for rebuilding Catholic culture by Michael P. Krom Jared Staudt’s new book argues that culture is nourished at home and in the parish, then strengthened and refined at the university.
Restoring Humanity: Essays on the Evangelization of Culture by R. Jared Staudt
Is culture important? Yes. But are some parts of culture more important for others? Can one speak of preserving or passing on a culture if one does not have a community? The family is insufficient for the passing on of a culture, it must do this as a part of a political community, and the children of that family, when they are of age, must marry children from other families. The moral culture is of first importance for a community; without it a community cannot be stable enough for the keeping of intellectual culture and the arts. And while Christian intellectual culture is important for the living of the faith, it is doubtful that all of the Western Christian tradition needs to be preserved in a single community or handed on as a part of "liberal education." So some treasures (e.g. the liturgy, Holy Scripture) are more important than others.

Explaining the Benedict Option

Another hustle?

The Benedict Option is a lot more than a book - and a lot of people are living it. https://t.co/uKKn4v5zMI

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) September 10, 2020

AmConMag

RD: Tell us the basics of this online course you’re offering.

CT: The online course/seminar, entitled “Benedict’s Rule and Modern Society: A Guide for Living the Benedict Option,” essentially presents a deep dive into the Rule of St. Benedict, looking at how we as Christians in modern society might apply Benedict’s own wisdom to the needs of our time, especially in the light of the present crises we are facing. The course is structured around three central themes:

1. Bringing God’s Divine Order into our relationship with creation (Benedictine Economics)
2. Bringing Divine Order into our relationships with one another (Benedictine Organizational Principles and Governance), and
3. Bringing Divine Order into our relationship with God (Benedictine Spirituality).

Participants will learn about the practical principles that can be derived from Benedict’s Rule (which is, as you mentioned in The Benedict Option, essentially a political constitution for Christian community life) and what we can learn from them to guide our own BenOp communities and initiatives. Emphasis will be given to practical application, and include open discussion time throughout the three-hour course to address specific questions and challenges that participants have encountered or are facing in their own experience of (or aspirations for) BenOp living.

The basic idea is this: If we want to follow the way of St. Benedict as an Option for surviving as Christians, what are some of the key things we need to learn from Benedict himself about how to successfully put this into practice? Thanks be to God, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here – Benedict himself can guide us with the wisdom of his “constitution” that has been around for over 1,400 years, and outlasted countless dark ages, crises, and civilizational collapses.

Does the Rule of St. Benedict really have that much to say about the formation and preservation of political communities?

Cameron Thompson

"The Cassiodorus Necessity"

"Cassiodorus sets one book after another in orbit around the sacred writings, resulting in a sprawling solar system of texts."

Richard Hughes Gibson on the perpetual imperative of cultural transmission in The Cassiodorus Necessityhttps://t.co/rfpqTswtbD

— Plough Publishing (@PloughBooks) September 5, 2020

The Plough

Hm?

Bless his heart, the Greek archbishop condemns the Benedict Option, but I'd bet you my yearly tithe that he hasn't read it. They never have, these people. https://t.co/CQMDnrveCh

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) June 20, 2020

Evangelicals Have a Bigger Problem Than Their Trump Support

It's their own form of Christianity that is the problem, and talk about "holiness" being the priority is useless if Evangelicals don't know how it is to be achieved. How many Evangelicals are deracinated civic nationalists who have accepted liberalism and capitalism as foundational values? How many of them have already capitulated to feminism?

Rod Dreher: The Coming Christian Reckoning

Dreher writes:

It’s not just the Evangelical church. All the churches — and that also means conservative churches and liberal churches — who have substituted and continue to substitute chasing issues for cultivating holiness, and the practices of holiness, are going to fall. You cannot vote, or demonstrate, or emote your way out of this Reckoning.

Christians who haven’t been making plans for the aftermath had better get started.

There will be a Reckoning, but Dreher's solution that is the Benedict Option is inadequate. Even the focus on personal holiness is not enough, as holiness is a conformity to the commandments of God. Dreher will never criticize feminism fully.

MSM Attention and Scrutiny of the FSSPX

KBI is investigating priests in Kansas town that draws parishioners from across U.S.

Rod Dreher: SSPX Abuse Scandal Hits Mainstream Media

It has not escaped my notice that St. Marys is the kind of place that could be fairly identified as a Benedict Option community. To be sure, I have never, ever claimed, nor would I ever claim, that you can escape sin. Still, even though I’m no longer Catholic, I do find it particularly painful that this is going on within a community that really is trying to live by traditional standards. It doesn’t negate their aspirations to holiness, including communal holiness, but it does make it harder for people to trust the leadership.

It may be a cult, but I have doubts as to whether it is a community. A community polices itself and its leadership justly and effectively.

Probably Won't Be Like Rules for Retrogrades

I love cover art for my upcoming book, w/@blsandford, about "soft totalitarianism" & strategies offered for today's church by Christians who endured Soviet-bloc oppression. Pub date 9/29. As of today, you can pre-order it on Amazon, in Kindle or hardcover: https://t.co/MBm4axDXig pic.twitter.com/wvQaPoDQBl

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) May 17, 2020

Maybe I'll get a copy of Rules for Retrogrades when TAN has a big sale. I suspect that it isn't close to what is advocated by those in the alt-r.

Is a Christian obligated always to use dialectic when engaging in those who are enemies of his community? I think it can be argued that a Christian can use rhetoric to discredit the enemies of his community in order to protect his community and to persuade the uncommitted, but such an action may not be reckoned as "nice" behavior. Shaming them , e.g. calling them easily triggered snowflakes may not be an effective tactic all the time, as some may not care. Shaming tactics can and should be morally used with one's own community; with those who are outside the community it is less of a shaming action than an insult but an insult that may be truth-telling.

Just resistance in political arrangement such as ours is something that Latin moral theology has not really considered, and may never consider before the collapse of Catholic higher education is complete. Responding to attacks by SJWs may necessarily include communication, but communication is only one response of many.

Rod Dreher Responds to Austin Ruse

‘Apocalypse Any Day Now!’

What I don’t do, either in the book or my writing, is allow people to think that political activism is the solution to our crisis. Hear me: I believe that political activism is important, and should continue. My objection is to the belief widespread among conservative Christians, my own tribe, that our problem is essentially a matter of not having gotten the politics right. Austin Ruse is a political activist by profession. He runs a United Nations lobbying organization called C-Fam. Good for him! I mean that seriously. He should keep going. What he does is not the problem, except insofar as ordinary Christians believe that kind of activism Ruse does is not only necessary (which it is), but sufficient (which it absolutely is not).

Plough Feature Interview with Stanley Hauerwas

In which Stanley Hauerwas is mad at @Vermeullarmine and yours truly. https://t.co/ZEekqmhRo9

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) April 27, 2020

Plough: Schooling Hope

Hauerwas:

That’s an indication that we are living in a technologically advanced civilization that is dedicated to efficiency and that has lost the tradition of wisdom. The elderly should be held accountable for helping us become articulate about how to live. That we think their primary task is to return to childhood robs them of responsibility and us of the kind of wisdom that we need to live well. If in a hundred years, Christians are identified as the people who don’t kill their children or kill their elders we will have done well. Terrible things can happen in the name of compassion.

In order to live well, we require people of wisdom who have insight about the goods that make life livable. In craft traditions, there are those who know how to respond to particular challenges in, say, building a house. The answers to those challenges are not always there in a book, but are there in a person who learned how to respond. We must understand ourselves to be people who depend upon others who have learned how to live wisely. The world needs grandparents.

Ah yes, well, what have the Boomers done for those who have come after them? Many of these Boomers do not want to be involved with their grandchildren, preferring to live in their sunny retirement location.

Rod Dreher Responds to Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair: "Call it the Tucker Carlson Wing of the GOP" The American Conservative Watns to Be the Atlantic of the Right

Dreher: The Culture War: Why We Still Fight

But we should never, ever allow ourselves to be gaslit by liberals or libertarians who tell us that nobody cares about this stuff anymore, so we should just drop it. 

Nor, for that matter, should we allow ourselves to be gaslit by figures within Religious Conservatism, Inc., who insist that we are within one election, and one Supreme Court appointment, from “victory.” It’s not true, and it was never true, and believing that the culture war was primarily a political and legal conflict was a massive strategic error of an entire generation, from which we have yet to recover. Going forward, the most important work of the culture war will be mounting guerrilla resistance within a culture whose dominant institutions were long ago captured by the other side.

Related:
The New Right, the Benedict Option, and a Second Look at Waco by Arthur Bloom
What the biggest Clinton-era law enforcement scandal can tell us about conservative challenges ahead.

Coincidentally, I later found this tweet, written by someone associated with Catholic Herald and posing as a moderate I suppose:

You: Have you read The Benedict Option?

Me: No but I watched the live-action remake. pic.twitter.com/C8NySIbnjd

— Zac Mabry (@ZacMabry) April 26, 2020

Intellectual and Social Dhimmitude

A Muslim Benedict Option by Rod Dreher

It’s interesting to reflect on how as a Christian in post-Christian America, I would probably feel better with the Muslims of Al-Maqasid as my neighbors than with nominally Christian people who fully accepted the immoralities of popular culture. But that’s the world we find ourselves in. And here’s a further strange thing, something I can’t quite figure out. I would feel more comfortable with these Muslims as neighbors than with hardline fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because if we lived around Christians, I would feel that my Christian children would have to constantly be on defense about their Orthodox Christian faith, whereas with Muslims, this would probably not be contested territory.

How can those skeptical of his presentation of the Benedict Option read this and not think that his children are being sheltered and not engaging "the world"? His children should not respond to "hardline fundamentalist Christians" with a "defensive mentality" nor an "offensive aggresive mentality," but with charity and friendliness and welcoming hospitality to their Christian brethren, to hold frame, as it were, and to conquer hearts with courageous love. Even if differences in Christian belief and practice cannot be reconciled, they can still form alliances, even political friendship with other Christians, if they choose to reach out and manifest the proper goodwill needed. This should be a no-brainer for someone who supposedly is familiar with Southern culture.

Two Important Points Made

OrthoChristian: Don’t Look for New Ideals. The Monastic Life Has Always Been an Example for the Laity by Hieromonk Thaddeus (Pestov)

 —Should we endure financial and family problems, or should we fight for a better life?

—It’s not for nothing that they say a place does not save a man, but a man is saved in that place where the Lord put him. If you have the strength and opportunity, why not fight, move, change jobs? We are strangers on this earth.

It’s another matter when you can’t change anything and you have to accept circumstances as a given. You mustn’t lose courage, but turn to God, live the spiritual life, and enjoy those blessings that you have at the moment.

Christ teaches us to love God and neighbor, to fulfill the commandments—no one has or will abolish this until the end of his earthly life. Everything else is temporary, but we must do what depends on us.

—What should a parish community look like?

—The most ideal community is a monastery: people united by the same aspiration, living by the same spirit. Monasteries have always been models for the laity too. You won’t find any new templates.

Will Christians fight or will they resign themselves to the revolution being an accomplished fact?

As for living the same spirit, even monasteries are dependent upon that unity of purpose to provide limits for behavior of its members. However, the unity of spirit for parishes requires unanimity regarding their place in the political sphere.

Which brings me to the following... Three Years Of ‘The Benedict Option’ by Rod Dreher - three years since its initial publication and Dreher hasn't learned much about what is required for community.

Not Unexpected

Rod Dreher looks at the neoreactionaries and flinches.

Persecutorial Progressivism

Italian Localism

The Cascina San Benedetto Vision

What about the ethnic homogeneity?

Touchstone Conference 2019

The speakers are a mixed bag.



info

The Gospel of Niceness

Leah Libresco Sargeant should read 1 Timothy 2:12, because she doesn't know what she is talking about here.

Fear and the Benedict Option by Leah Libresco Sargeant

Feeling excluded or alone can lead Christians to adopt as fellow travelers provocateurs who may scandalize the secular world, but not because they preach the faith that is “foolishness to the gentiles.” Such grifting agitators are not seeking space to speak the truth, but to revel in division. They may lead people moved by real political concerns to view their opponents as permanent enemies, not our divided brothers whom we are called to pray for and convert into allies. They may lead people who already feel isolated to seek consolation by grounding their identity in race, not Christ. Conveniently, they forget that the most vicious and violent suppression of Christians falls on non-white Christians in China, Southeast Asia, and outside the West. A Benedict Option strengthening persecuted Christians shouldn’t be primarily white or Western.

The emotion in question is not fear.

Dreher Has Read Weyrich

Now he has to read Lind.

To be sure, Wolfgang isn’t entirely approving of the Benedict Option: 

No one in Christian life today fills the space that Neuhaus/Novak/Weigel did 20 years ago. No one has a comprehensive vision of the near-future like theirs, and no one offers a battle plan like theirs. In that empty space, we get Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher. They’re smart guys who are trying to think our way out of this. But they haven’t answered the challenges either. 

I can’t really argue with him there, but in my own defense (and in partial defense of George Weigel), the challenges are so massive and protean that I don’t think it’s possible to discern a comprehensive vision of the near-future, much less formulate a battle plan.

AmConMag: Benedict Option: What Else Is There? by ROD DREHER

Fairfield Carmelites

Their website.

CWR: In Pennsylvania, Carmelites plan a “micro village” according to St. Teresa’s vision

What Should Supplement the Benedict Option?

Benedict Option & Christian Resilience By ROD DREHER

Ancient Faith Radio: Chastity, Purity, Integrity

What is still missing? A robust communitarianism that gives the principles necessary for community-formation and maintenance. That is a key to the ecclesial problem of the local Church, and the political problem of the state.